About Gwen

Gwen Gordon is an Emmy award winning creative director who began a life of play designing and building Muppets for Sesame Street. She left the “Street” to join an Apple research group at the MIT Media Lab where she built furry computer play stations for children. Gwen started Creatures at Large, a production company based on the Gumpers, her own puppet characters and the non-profit educational foundation, Big Picture Productions, supporting children in hospitals and pediatric HIV/AIDS. Gwen has been an artist-in-residence in settings ranging from Xerox PARC to San Quentin Prison, working with research scientists and prison inmates.

As an independent scholar with a masters degree in philosophy, Gwen draws from across disciplines ranging from literature and philosophy to evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Her insights are grounded in life experience and twenty years with clients and students. Gwen has published articles in peer-reviewed journals including The Journal for Humanistic Psychology, Play and Culture Studies, and The American Journal of Play and in anthologies including The Handbook on the Study of Play and Earthlight: Spiritual Wisdom for an Ecological Age. Gwen has been adjunct faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and Holy Names University.

Trained by the Coaches Training Institute, Gwen has been coaching leaders and creatives since 2002. She and CTI co-founder, Henry Kimsey-House designed the master level coaching course based on Gwen’s play insights. Gwen also led the year-long CTI leadership training.

As a consultant, Gwen has applied her insights to the design of programs for companies including IDEO and PepsiCo, groups ranging from life coaches to TSA security officers, and for popular films including What the Bleep Do We Know?!, and The Story of Stuff. She has roused audiences at Mattel, PepsiCo, UC Davis, UC San Diego, The World Congress of Play, KidScreen, and Sandbox Summit West.